Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [50]
There are still many places in this country where living a nontraditional sexual lifestyle is considered a justification for legally removing your children from your custody. Even when you are sure you are doing no harm, you still may need to protect your kids from Mrs. Grundy. We can’t give you concrete guidelines on this, because only you can know the atmosphere in your particular community and the personalities of your own children.
What Should They See?
We think it’s a good idea to model physical and verbal affection for children; that’s how they learn to be affectionate adults. But you’ll have to make some decisions about the appropriate dividing line between physical affection and sexual demonstrativeness.
Do your kids get to see you hugging your partners? Kissing them? Touching them? These are all decisions we can’t make for you. You have to think them through yourself—taking into account such issues as their ages, their levels of sophistication, and their perceptions about your existing relationships—and abide by your own decisions.
Nudity is a gray area. We certainly don’t think kids are harmed by growing up in households where casual nudity is the norm. But children who have never been around nude adults may be upset if nudity is suddenly introduced into their living room. Kids can be very sensitive to issues like sexual display, and flashing is clearly a violation of boundaries. Certainly, if a child expresses discomfort with being around your or your friends’ nudity, his or her desires should be respected. And we hope it goes without saying that no child should ever be required to be nude in front of others—many children go through phases of extreme modesty as they struggle to cope with their changing bodies, and that, too, deserves scrupulous respect.
What Should They Do?
It is illegal and immoral to allow your kids to engage in any form of sexual behavior with any adult, or to allow your partners to be sexual or seductive with your kids. Many children go through one or more sexually explorative and/or flirtatious periods in their lives—this is natural and common. But it’s important that you and your friends maintain especially good boundaries during such periods; learning polite and friendly ways of acknowledging a child’s changing needs without engaging sexually is a critical skill for ethical sluts who spend time around their own or their partners’ kids. (“Isn’t that cute? You’re getting to be such a big girl now!”) The best way to teach your child good boundaries is to be clear about your own and to respect the child’s right to grow up free from violation.
Answering Their Questions
Kids’ questions about sex and relationships can often be challenging—from the five-year-old’s “But how does the seed get to the egg?” to the teenager’s “So how come you get to fuck anyone you want, but I have to be home by midnight?”
Here’s where the skills you’ve learned in other parts of this book can come in handy. You owe your kids honest, heartfelt responses to questions like these; this is not the time to come on all high-handed and parental. Particularly with older children and teenagers, it’s fine to let them know if you’re feeling ambivalent or embarrassed about something: they’ll know anyway, believe us. If a situation makes you angry or sad, share that, too. They may need some reassurance that your emotion isn’t their fault and some reinforcement that it’s not their job to help you feel better.
It’s also fine to test their willingness to receive information. Before you start heaping data on their heads, you can try prefacing your communication with a question like, “Do you want to know about [whatever the topic is]?” Janet remembers a conversation with her older son when he was about ten: she’d just done a “birds and bees” rap and had perhaps